V.iii.Sentimental Labor and Sympathetic Communicat...
For Smith, this distension of selfhood consists in a very visually presented tripartite division of the spectator, the actor and the third person, the mechanism of which works through sympathy as a matter of duplicating another’s feelings.All sympathy is constitutively agreeable.As a matter of fact, “we”take delight in perceiving imitation.The spectator, Smith argues, derives pleasures from
the emotion which arises from his observing the perfect coincidence between his sympathetic passion in himself, and the original passionin the person principally concerned.This last emotion, in which the sentiment of approbation properly consists, is always agreeable and delightful.The other may either be agreeable or disagreeable, according to the nature of the original passion, whose features it must always, in some measure, retain ....Two Sounds, I suppose, may, each of them taken singly, be austere, and yet, if they be perfect concords, the perception of this harmony and coincidence may be agreeable[40].
The sound analogy reminds of the flute that functions as a Romantic literary trope[41], and it appears to an atomistic and seemingly solipsist world resolved in harmony and coincidence.Emotions, like the two sounds for Smith, are essentially communicative, as observed by Daniel M.Gross[42].Nevertheless, rather than another rehearsal of the romantic trope of the musical transference of the Spirit, sentiment—specifically sympathy—is from being natural and spontaneous.It offers the bodily sensations or sensorial organization as sites of cultivation and labor through a theatrical tripartite of the spectator, the actor and the third person.Adam Smith was writing at the time when the body was turned into the market of laboring and consuming through a development of an inner life of its own, visible and audible.Self, with its business of meaning and feeling, and market(with its capacity to capitalize) are two of the same machine or mechanism, equivalent to what Smith calls “the Idea of a System”that runs rampant through the Enlightenment.Hannah Arendt once argues:
Nothing, in fact, is less common and less communicable, and therefore more securely shielded against the visibility and audibility of the public realm, than what goes on within the confines of thebody, its pleasures and its pains, its laboring and consuming.(Arendt 112)
Rather than “the confines of the body”as natural, nevertheless, this privacy of the body is invented by the public realm of production and reproduction so as to be explored in its laboring and consuming, including its affective pleasures and pains.This system moves what Foucault calls “the concepts of money, price, value, circulation, and market”from their seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries’ “rigorous and general epistemological arrangement”to a more visible “system of identities and differences.”After this paradigm shift,
all wealth is coinable; and it is by this means that it enters into circulation—in the same way that any natural being was characterizable, and could thereby find its place in a taxonomy; that any individual was nameable and could find its place in an articulated language; that any representation was signifiable and could find its place, in order to be known.(Foucault 1970:175)
A profound space common to body and money, to both wealth and representation, was opening up.Circulation became one of the fundamental categories of analysis, socially as well as physiologically.It is in this historical background we take Smith’s moral philosophy of sympathetic sentiment and his political economy of society resonates rather than conflicts with each other.
For Smith, sympathy is not a “selfish”system for which Thomas Reid criticized him[43].The sympathetic spectator imagines not being himself in the agent’s situation but being the agent in that situation:
But though sympathy is very properly said to arise from an imaginary change of situations with the person principally concerned, yet this imaginary change is not supposed to happen tome in my own person and character, but in that of the person with whom I sympathize.(Smith 1984:317)(https://www.daowen.com)
It is an economy of substitution and situation, close to identification but never the same, especially in two extreme situations, bereavement and death.If I sympathetically grieve with you in your bereavement, my “grief ...is entirely upon your account, and not in the least upon my own.It is not, therefore, in the least selfish”(317).Thus, there exists difference between sentiments of the spectator and the agents.The “as it were”in “we enter as it were into his body”and “in some measure”in “we become in some measure the same person”suggest significant difference between the agent’s feeling and the spectator’s, the latter of which is brought into existence and sustained through the imaginative act of sentimental labor[44].His being sympathetic “excites some degree of the same emotion, in proportion to the vivacity or dullness of the conception”(9):
What they [the spectators] feel, will, indeed, always be, in some respects, different from what he [the agent] feels, and compassion can never be exactly the same with original sorrow; because the secret consciousness that the change of situations, from which the sympathetic sentiment arises, is but imaginary, not only lowers it in degree, but, in some measure, varies it in kind, and gives it a quite different modification.(22)
The correspondence, although imperfect, is, however, “sufficient for the harmony of society”and “this is all that is wanted or required[45].”Alexander Broadie argues that Smithian sympathy is not about the singularity of each feeling or perception, but of a kind of universality through which “the spectator has the feeling—he has it sympathetically”(Broadie 164).In other words, it is a voluntary attitude and sentiment to involve and engage the other as part of self:
His agonies, when they are thus brought home to ourselves, when we have thus adopted and made them our own, begin at last to affect us, and we then tremble and shudder at the thought of what he feels.(Smith 1984:9)
This mode of universality is very significant for Smith.It is more about a mode of understanding and perceiving, as suggested in his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres.In which a historian has to produce a wide range of sympathetic responses in the reader:
The accidents that befall irrationall(sic) objects affect us merely by their externall(sic) appearance, their Novelty, Grandeur, etc., but those which affect the human Species interest us greatly by the Sympatheticall(sic) affections they raise in us.We enter into their [sc.human beings’] misfortunes, grieve when they grieve, rejoice when they rejoice, and in a word feel for them in some respect as if we ourselves were in the same condition.The design of historicall(sic) writing is not merely to entertain:(this perhaps is the intention of an epic poem); besides that it has in view the instruction of the reader.It sets before us the more interesting and important events of human life, points out the cause by which these events were brought about and by this means points out to us by what manner and method we may produce similar good effects or avoid similar bad ones.(Smith 1983:90)[46]
Smith’s moral philosophy depends a great deal on the “illusion of the imagination”involved in this act of sympathy.The spectator takes the situation of the agents, as a text analogous to “the design of historical writing,”through a willing observation upon which he does a contextual(or situational) reading.The physiological effects—“tremble,”“shudder,”or otherwise—upon the spectator are a consequence upon identifying and accommodating what is read as part of an affective self.This adverbial sense of sympathy realizes the theatrical presentation and representation of division of labor among the spectator, actor and third person regarding their perception, epistemology and communication.Smith’s writing defines this as
arranged and digested, both in their coincidence and in their succession, into so complete and regular a system ...not unlike that which it derives from the contemplation of a great system in any other science[47].
This moral philosophy of sentiment presents itself as a strong system-building symptomatic of Western Enlightenment.